About

Gene De Lisa is a Classical Music Composer, Author, Educator, Lecturer and Feline Psychic. Even though there are tens of dollars to be made as a classical music composer in the U.S., he instead pays for most of his cat food bill by developing software.

My name is usually misspelled as “Delisa” since many systems have problems with an obscure character known as a “space.” I earned a doctorate in composition from the University of North [sic] Texas College of Music. That, along with $0.75, will buy you a soda. That degree’s emphasis was on computer music – which at that time meant you had to learn how to actually program (C, C++ and Objective-C on a Unix box then a NeXT) and learn digital signal processing.

Perhaps you found me through my computer composition book Computer Music in C – which is amazingly still at Amazon. (It went out of print decades ago – along with the royalties). I’m sorry but I don’t remember a word of what I wrote. I still write software to assist myself in composition. These days its mostly in Java and sometimes Groovy. The key word I just used as “assist”; these days I find algorithmic composition pointless. Those Fractal pieces I wrote in the early 80s seemed to be a cool idea at the time though.